How do we detect device generation?

TwistedMech

So I writing this retro shoot-em-up and it has animated aliens who fire bullets etc. Running spawn tests, I managed to get a still workable iPhone 3GS with 50 aliens each shooting 1 bullet. So around 100 objects in motion.

Now, when I put this to a 1st Gen iTouch or iPhone 3G its way to unplayable as frame rate must be in 4-5fps. So I chop almost everything out but keep a small rotating back drop, 10 aliens, 30 bullets etc but its less than 10fps.

As I cant really put out a game which runs excellent on a 3GS and like a one legged hopping dog, I need a way to detect the generation of device so that I can get the app to auto destroy non-critical game actors at the start of each level.

Any ideas? In fact, it would be good to retrieve as much device info as possible.

quantumsheep

I found that Bugzone didn't work too well on a first gen ipod touch. It would crash as I had multiple enemies, spawned lots of bullets at once from your ship, and an animated background.

While I couldn't actually detect the device as you've described, I did put an option in to turn off animations on both the enemies and the background - it worked fine after that.

So my advice is to put in an option that lets users manually change the game for now.

Not ideal, but I hope that helps,

Cheers,

QS

TwistedMech

user selecting the device type is not ideal but probably the only way. From spending years developing shareware on the PC, it seems many users want to just use and not have to think about things like setup. I might try and do something like spawn X actors in 2 seconds and see what the count is. 3GS or faster will be quick while older will be less (should be ::-) )

I hope iSlate will be support by GS and hope conversion of existing projects will be seamless. I would expect V1.0 to be released at MAC World.